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Tucked deep in the 1,198-page U.S. House agriculture policy legislation is an initiative to guarantee prices for sushi rice. So too is insurance for alfalfa and a marketing plan for Christmas trees.

Catfish farmers also get a morsel in the proposal being taken up this week: profit-margin insurance. The products represent a tiny fraction of the $440 billion U.S. farm economy. Yet each is slated to receive special treatment -- either through subsidized insurance, promotional programs or protections against imports -- in the bill that carries an estimated 10-year price tag of $939 billion.
Enlarge image Sushi Aid in $1 Trillion Agriculture Bill Angers Watchdogs

New initiatives in the agriculture bill are meant to benefit everything from olive oil to sushi rice. Photographer: David Silverman/Getty Images
Enlarge image Sushi Aid in $1 Trillion U.S. Agriculture Bill Irks Watchdogs

Corn grows in a field in Tiskilwa, Illinois. Both the Senate and House versions of the agriculture bill would reduce payments to growers of corn, wheat and other crops by eliminating a $5 billion-a-year program of direct subsidies while expanding subsidized crop insurance. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

“We’re in a golden age of agriculture,” with producer profits projected at a record $128.2 billion this year, Vince Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University, said at a briefing on Capitol Hill last week. The House bill “is about as bad a bill as I could think of writing as an economist,” he said.
Read More>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...watchdogs.html
The federal government seems to be completely unaware that we are broke.

The difference between pigs and people is that when they tell you you're cured it isn't a good thing.

I like sushi, but not to the point that I could justify spending a trillion dollars on it.

Of your own money? Of course not. Nobody in their right mind would. It's other people's money that the government spends on this idiocy, without so much as a second thought, and anyone who objects to this is labeled as an extremist.